Early Britain—Roman Britain eBook

B. 3.—­In all the lists we are struck by
the extraordinary preponderance of northern names.
Half the sites given by Ptolemy lie north of the Humber,
and this is also the case with the Ravenna list, while
in the ‘Notitia’ the proportion is far
greater. In the last case this is due to the
fact that the military garrisons, with which the catalogue
is concerned, were mainly quartered in the north, and
a like explanation probably holds good for the earlier
and later lists also. Nennius, as is to be expected,
draws most of his names from the districts which the
Saxons had not yet reached; all being given with the
Celtic prefix Caer (=city).

B. 4.—­Amid all these snares the most certain
identification of a Roman site is furnished by the
discovery of inscriptions relating to the special
troops with which the name is associated in historical
documents. When, for example, we find in the Roman
station at Birdoswald, on the Wall of Hadrian, an
inscription recording the occupation of the spot by
a Dacian cohort, and read in the ‘Notitia’
that such a cohort was posted at Amboglanna per
lineam Valli, we are sure that Amboglanna and
Birdoswald are identical. This method, unfortunately,
helps us very little except on the Wall, for the legionary
inscriptions elsewhere are found in many places with
which history does not particularly associate the
individual legions thus commemorated.[204] However,
the special number of such traces of the Second Legion
at Caerleon, the Twentieth at Chester, and the Sixth
at York, would alone justify us in certainly determining
those places to be the Isca, Deva, and Eboracum given
as their respective head-quarters in our documentary
and historical evidence.

B. 5.—­In the case of York another proof
is available; for the name, different as it sounds,
can be traced, by a continuous stream of linguistic
development, through the Old English Eorfowic to the
Roman Eboracum. In the same way the name
of Dubris has unmistakably survived in Dover,
Lemannae in Lympne, Regulbium in Reculver.
Colonia, Glevum, Venta, Corinium, Danum,
and Mancunium, with the suffix “chester,"[205]
have become Colchester, Gloucester, Winchester, Cirencester,
Doncaster, and Manchester. Lincoln is Lindum
Colonia, Richborough, Ritupis; while the
phonetic value of the word London has remained absolutely
unaltered from the very first, and varies but slightly
even in its historical orthography.

B. 6.—­With names of this class, of which
there are about thirty, for a starting-point, we can
next, by the aid of our various lists (especially
Ptolemy’s, which gives the tribe in which each
town lies, and the ’Itinerary’), assign,
with a very high degree of probability, some thirty
more—­similarity of name being still more
or less of a guide. For example, when midway
between Venta (Winchester) and Sorbiodunum
(Sarum) the ‘Itinerary’ places Brige,